MASP

After a period in New York studying graphic design at the Parsons School of Design in the 1950s, Wesley Duke Lee began to work over the next decade with media that, until then, had been little explored by Brazilian artists, such as installations, performance and video. He was a founding member of the Rex Group and of Rex Gallery, which challenged the place of art in formal institutions and the marketplace. Rapid technological developments of the late 1970s—photocopy machines, digitalization and computing—inspired Lee’s production, although he did not forfeit traditional techniques like painting, drawing and collage. This is the context in which Untitled [Untitled] (1979), from the Papéis [Papers] series and its 400 works appeared, as commissions from the board of the recently created Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM), headquartered in Rio de Janeiro. Lee selected archival documents from the Bolsa de Valores do Rio de Janeiro and the Banco do Brasil Museum, including securities from the imperial era and the first pledge issued by the Banco do Brasil in 1853. Based on this research, at the Xerox Research Center in New York the artist developed collage procedures using the variations of color, focus and printing offered by Xerox machines. There he created around 2,100 different reproductions that he described as “unique xerox,” which he then reassembled in the series of 400 color photocopies. The work displayed the tension between notions of value throughout Brazilian history and their representation in public bonds; the relations between artwork and promissory notes of future value; the borders separating copy and original.

— Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP, 2018

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